POV: Nova
One forty-seven in the morning.
That was my guess. No clock, no phone, no window. Just the count I had been keeping in my head since the guard left, marking seconds into minutes into hours like a metronome that could not afford to stop.
The rotation was coming.
I nudged Sera. She was not asleep I do not think either of us had slept a single minute. She straightened immediately, no groggy blinking, no confused pause. Ready. I had chosen right with her.
I looked around the room. The other girls were either sleeping or staring at nothing. I thought briefly about waking them, bringing them all. I ran the numbers fast. Six girls moving together through two corridors in the dark were not six times more likely to succeed. They were six times more likely to make noise, trip, panic, freeze. I could not save everyone tonight. I could save one.
I hated that math. I did it anyway.
I pressed my back flat against the left wall and moved toward the door through the blind spot. Sera followed, stepping exactly where I stepped. Good. She was a fast learner.
I pulled the clip from my pocket.
My neighbor Mr. Foss was seventy-one years old and had been picking cheap locks since before I was born. He taught me the way old people teach things slowly, over many afternoons, making me do it over and over until my fingers knew the motion without my brain having to manage it. He said it was a useless skill. He taught it to me anyway. I had never been more grateful for a useless skill in my life.
I bent the clip at the right angle by feel alone.
I slid it into the keypad's manual override slot every electronic lock had one, a backup for power failures, a thin vertical slot just below the main panel that most people never noticed.
I started working.
The first ten minutes were nothing. Just metal against metal, small adjustments, listening for the faint click that meant I had found the right pressure point. My fingers were sweating. I wiped them on my jeans and kept going.
Fifteen minutes. Twenty.
Sera did not make a sound behind me. Did not ask how long. Did not shift her weight or sigh or do any of the small impatient things scared people do. She just waited. I focused on that her steadiness at my back when my hands started shaking.
Thirty minutes.
The click, when it came, was so small I almost missed it.
I caught it.
I pressed down on the handle.
The door opened.
The corridor outside was dim and empty. Ten seconds into the rotation gap the guard had just left. We had sixty seconds, maybe ninety if we were lucky.
"Now," I breathed.
We moved.
The first corridor was clear. Concrete floor, overhead lights at half power, two more cameras both with angles I had memorized from the brief glimpse I got when they brought me in. I hugged the right wall and moved fast.
The second corridor was longer.
We were halfway down it when the light on the camera above us went from green to red.
I had half a second to think: they updated the system.
Then the alarm went off.
It was loud loud enough to feel in my back teeth, loud enough that Sera gasped and grabbed my arm. Somewhere behind us I heard shouting, boots on concrete, doors slamming open.
I stopped thinking and started running.
"Do not let go," I said, and grabbed Sera's hand, and we ran.
I did not know this building perfectly. I knew one thing about it when they brought me in through the front I had caught a glimpse of a loading dock sign pointing left at the far end of the entry hall. Loading docks meant back exits. Back exits meant outside.
We took every left.
A guard rounded a corner fifteen feet ahead. He saw us. His eyes lit up ability activating and he raised his hand.
I did the only thing I could do. I ran straight at him.
He did not expect that. Nobody ever expects the Powerless girl to run toward the threat. I ducked under his outstretched arm, shoved him sideways as hard as I could with both hands, and his shot went wide and blew a chunk out of the wall beside us. Sera was already past him before he recovered.
Three more corridors.
Two more turns.
And then I could see it the loading dock door, heavy metal, a push bar across the middle, a red exit sign above it glowing like a promise.
We were three steps away.
One step.
The explosion hit before I could reach the bar.
It came from the front of the building a sound like the world splitting in half, a pressure wave that knocked me into the wall and Sera into me and both of us onto the floor. The lights went out completely. Dust rained from the ceiling. Somewhere above us something cracked and groaned and a section of the ceiling came down in a crash of concrete and metal between us and the exit door.
I could not breathe for a moment. Just shock, just ringing ears, just the dusty dark pressing in from every side.
"Sera." I found her arm. "Sera, are you hurt?"
"No." Coughing. "I am okay. I am okay."
The dust was starting to settle. Emergency lights flickered on dim red, casting everything in the color of a warning. The exit door was still there but the ceiling collapse had dropped a wall of debris between us and it. Too much to move. Too heavy to shift.
I turned around.
The front wall of the building was simply gone.
Where there had been concrete and metal there was now open night air and a cloud of dust and settling debris. And through that dust, walking in from outside like the destruction was a minor inconvenience, like explosions were just weather, came a man.
He was tall. Dark hair. The kind of face that would stop you even in normal circumstances, even when your ears were ringing and your legs were shaking.
His eyes were pale gray and they glowed faintly in the dark, the way powered people's eyes did when their ability was running.
He was completely calm.
The chaos around him the alarms, the screaming, the guards scrambling in every direction seemed to not reach him at all. He walked through it the way you walk through a room you own.
And he was looking directly at me.
Not at the guards. Not at the building. Not at the destruction around him.
At me.
Like he had been looking for something specific in all this chaos.
Like he had just found it.
The dust shifted between us.
He did not reach for a weapon.
He did not call out to his team.
He just looked at me with those glowing gray eyes and took one slow step forward.
And the strangest thing happened the alarm, the shouting, the ringing in my ears all of it seemed to go quiet.
Like the whole burning building had decided to hold its breath.